The next Xbox: Always online, no second-hand games, 50GB Blu-ray discs and new Kinect

Microsoft’s next console will require an Internet connection in order to function, ruling out a second-hand game market for the platform. A new iteration of Xbox Live will be an integral part of Microsoft’s next console, while improved Kinect hardware will also ship alongside the unit.

Not only is it not universal, but imagine how often people get disconnected because their internet providers have screwed up. That would mean a shitload of angry gamers who can't play their offline games.

"don't believe it until its official as this would be a disastrous move by ms "

Yup, I'll believe the solid facts when the solid facts are presented to me. If this is true then MS can kiss goodbye to my cash anyway.
They can't continue to sell online games at such extortionate prices and then also rule out the possibility of even selling their consoles in retail stores like Gamestop because they would be destroying Gamestop's second hand trade.
I'm already sick of having to pay to play online with Xbox games, if these rumours are true MS are gonna lose a hell of a lot of ground on Sony.

The more I think about it, the less I see it happening. MS has 75 M out of those 40m are online, if they were to go online only then they will loose 35m, thats a lot of people and from a business model makes no sense. Blocking used games its a high posibility cause 500 store will be close from gamestop, which also tells me that if no used game then no backward compatibility. Both Sony and ms are on my hot list, if they both block used games, then I guess i will go retro with wiiu, this really makes no sense to me. Executive cant be that dumb, I mean I know they loose money from used game, but they will loose more when people dont buy their consoles.

I've been a more XBOX swayed gamer for the last 2 Generations (not that I don't play and own the others mind you. I can put up with paying for LIVE and the stupid amounts of advertising on my dash board because I really do get a lot of use out of some of its exclusive features (cross game chat is on about 90% of the time I am on)... But I won't be investing in an online only content restricting closed off machine like this article proposes. Hopefully it's just BS rumour, but if it's true... see ya!

If lived in example in UK and could in theory buy 30-40 brand new games month then it isnt a big deal. Unfortunately I can afford only ~10 games where I live and used games are crusial the only alternative is PC piracy

I don't want to be online all of the time for a single player game, that's just taking away bandwidth from other computers on my network, and I play on my downtime whilst my computers are downloading and stuff.

dont know why people disagreed with you, that's true, there has never been a case in PC gaming's history where you could sell an old game and have someone be able to use 100% of it, other than like...greenmangaming?

But yeah, I doubt microsoft is dumb enough to do that, and I reallllyyyyy doubt they are gonna make it so you have to have an internet connection to use the console, so don't worry Xbox fans, that can't possibly happen.

By locking up the software, you're taking away people's rights to resell what they just bought. You didn't just buy a useless disc, you paid 60 bucks for a full experience, however you can only sell a useless disc. BS.

Definitely not buying the next xbox, this leaves Sony wide open with a huge opportunity to allow used games, that alone will be enough to sweep next gen.

"No one should get it, this is basically making yourself a slave to Microsoft. Any other company that does this is also not getting my sale, I'd rather just switch to PC"

"Slaves" to the most popular method of purchasing games on the pc, thru Steam, say hi. Hehe so much for your PC rant.

But I see what you mean, at least you have a choice. I myself dont like all the clutter of dvd's and used game boxes all over the place is why I prefer digital downloads, but I get it's not for everyone.

@Saigon it sounds like Ms doesn't want third party to get the max out of the 720 because "close to the metal",if remember right is a program amd invented to extract max performance out of their processor.

Maybe. Close to Metal from AMD is a low level programming interface, and as such it could be one of the approved libraries that was mentioned in the article. It basically allows low level access to functions within the GPU through an API layer with less need to write complicated assembly code.

Close to the metal could also refer to Sony allowing developers to directly access the hardware on the system bypassing established libraries or API's, which in theory could improve performance in the hands of a skilled programmer. It's often referred to as assembly language, where a line of code corresponds to a single machine code instruction.

I heard that phrase years ago in PS2 days and my impression was it meant not relying so much on the ready made libraries enabling potentially better performance. Close to the metal means programing more directly to the hardware.

At least thats what I thought at the time. My guess is that the AMD program was named after that phrase.

Close to the metal predates the PS2 by a long time. In fact in the early days of micro processors quite a bit of programming was done in assembly. Close to Metal is just a way to describe what's going on with the code, or in AMD's case a trademark to describe their API.

With the PS2, Sony allowed quite a bit of low level functionality with the emotion engine. In fact the emotion engine was designed to be highly programmable to allow it to be used the way programmers needed to for a particular purpose. That kind of thing can really only be done with assembly, as the very nature of a high level API doesn't do that.

As a software developer I think it means MS is doing what they always do: Try to push their own SDKs/APIs over others and avoid using "universal" standards. They are doing this since around 2000. Most recent example? WebRTC. All companies agreed to use WebRTC as the standard protocol for P2P over a browser, expect MS.

I said it in the past: MS will try to push DirectX and thus make the games easily "ported" to Windows 8 store.

Sony is most likely to use OpenGl for PS4, which in reality allows games to be more easily ported to other platforms as OpenGl is a free, open standard, unlike DirectX which is a MS enforced one. Thus Sony from the sentence is most likely encouraging developers to "hack" the console, by allowing a low level access to hardware resources management. In example allow them to manually assign which blocks from an array to be loaded to specific parts of RAM or which thread each core should process...

When somebody says, "close to the metal" it actually means as close to binary language as possible which is the native language every part of your computer (or your console) speaks. It means it *CAN* be considerably more efficient, but has drawbacks such as hugely more tedious, more error prone and the efficiency is only tied to as good as the programmer is. If you are a poor programmer, then the result might be disastrous. It also means, it's harder to port, emulate or otherwise change as it is considerably harder to read the code.

By using libraries it is generally considerably easier to use, sometimes faster (because some smart dude making gazillion figure it out), and allows for far more flexibility.

If you do something weird close to the metal, you might find out on the next dash update your game doesn't work anymore. However, if you are good you will reap performance benefits. However, this might significantly screw up the potential to update the OS.

There is pro's and con's to each approach, but I would have thought Sony would have learned from MS to make it easy on the programmer. Generally, the performance gap is negligible at this stage and the one with the easiest to harness power from is usually the winner.

@rainslacker:

It doesn't need to be assembly, but is commonly assembly. Binary is the native language, but assembly is one step away from binary.

@Athonline:

Actually, this strategy is both what Sony and MS has been pursuing this entire generation. MS makes ready made libraries for almost anything. That is one of the big reasons Xbox 360 is perceived to be easier to program for.

While on the PS3, you do have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself, but has resulted in significant more resources poured into research to obtain those results.

nuke is right as well. Although to your counter point I doubt any programmers for games are writing machine code directly, so it is often referred to as assembly because that is what is most often used.:) I'm not even sure that it would be possible to write machine code in that fashion for these machines, and there isn't much need to in the first place.

The PS2 did have a couple games that didn't work on newer iterations of the hardware, although I can't remember what they were specifically. I don't think they were big name titles. The heavy use of assembly may have been the reason why.

MS approach to programming in almost everything is to make it easier on the programmer. Visual studio is powerful in it's flexibility and overall simplicity, but it comes at a cost of leaner, sometimes more efficient code. I've found myself often writing my own libraries for simpler things because of the bloat associated with their C libraries.

The only IDE I've used for Sony is their PS Mobile Suite which had less bloat in the interface, but suffered from using Mono thus working on a application layer which added it back in. It was simple enough to use however. PS Mobile is a different beast than their console libraries though so I can't really speak to those.

Perhaps part of the reason the Cell was so hard to program for was lack of pre-defined libraries, but some of it was also due to the architecture of the chip itself. The cell, much like the Emotion Engine, was highly programmable. To take away that "close to metal" approach could have seriously hampered it's capabilities.

I do agree with you on the pros and cons of each side though. It really all comes down to what the developers need to achieve, and what they are targeting for release. Either way, nowadays with so much middle ware for making games it may not even be as important, but still nice to have I suppose.

If I cant change games on it and buddies not able to bring their games on 720 I wont buy a 720. Always online? I dont think thats the case, not everyone like to be connected, I hope MS is not stupid enough to do this cause it will be a disaster for them. Main reason I buy for consoles and not pc its cause I dont need to register the bs game and then only let you installed in 2 pcs with same IP. Well, will see what happens. To think I was going to go with 720 this time around, lol, well I guess ps4.

Its pretty obvious to me edge is trying to get ms to talk about there next gen console. No way this will be true as the infrastructure is not there and would cost ms business and ms does not operate that way. As far as close to the metal think 360. The cell was the furtherst thing from that. They both are using pc architecture which will allow more comparartive third party games this round.

WTF / is microsoft trying to control masse gamers with this only option leaving out physical disc disbrution? if this their master plan i will end my gaming after sony stop supporting ps3 i like owning my games,touching my games.

I can't see this as being true. How does requiring internet connection in order to use Xbox benefit MS in anyway? I can't see them taking the risk on blocking used games either.

50GB Blu-Ray discs and Kinect 2 shipping with every Xbox seems plausible however. So this rumor is like half the info it contains mostly likely won't happen while the other half mostly likely will happen.

I just can't see MS demanding that all their consumers have internet connection in order to use their product. All they are really doing is limiting the amount of people that will buy it. Doesn't make sense to me.

I hope that it's not true about being always connected. Unless they plan to provide some kind of access, that cuts out a lot of people that either don't have or don't want Internet. Not sure who they are, but I'm sure they exist. Plus that would mean no gaming during power outages or service problems. Not acceptable.

A new kinect is to be expected, but if MS talks about it for a long time during their conferences than show bunch of kinect games than I will not buy the system. Support your core gamers but MS sees the casual wii crowd and they see kinect games selling so as usual they will forget about us. I hope I am wrong but over the last 3 years ms have proved that they only care about selling kinect and going after casual

Always online will means no buy for a lot of people including myself

If MS execs are dumb enough to push no used games TNA. Bye bye MS it was nice seeing you In gaming

I don't think any company is so dumb to block used games and always online for this gen

Sony actually filed a patent for a method to do this very thing. Enjoy playing your Wii-U next gen. Sounds like it might be a good time to build that new PC...or check out the steam box. I guess we will have to see this year.

I just dont understand why would people pay 50 dollars online when you can do it free for the PS3 and even PC..dont make no sense..if this turn out to be true Microsoft is just takin advantage of xbox fanboys

Well that really suck no used games, AND requiring a always online internet connection.

Requiring a always online internet connection is really terible. If your having internet problems or Xbox Live is down you cann't even play a single player game. So you will be totally locked out of your own system.

What happens if I get disconnected when playing a single player(will I be able to pickup where I left off or will I have to restart from my last save point)?

Well the ball is in Sony's court now. If the PS4 doesn't require a always online internet connection the PS4 will be a automatic buy for me while I won't even consider the 720. M$ had better hope Sony goes the same route otherwise the PS4 will have a insurmountable advantage.

One good thing though is the 50GB BluRay discs. That is absolutely massive, and its nice to see them not get rid of disks, but this will only matter if the PS4 also requires always online internet connection. if not I won't even consider a 720. The ball is your court Sony.

Anyway I plan to stick with last gen as long as possible before moving on to either a PS4 or 720.

I think that is the biggest problem I would have with it. I live in the third largest city in New England and have 30MBPS internet, but a storm rolls through, forget it. I'm losing internet. I have had DirecTV for five years and have lost service less in that entire five years then I have lost internet in the last six months. Hurricane Irene rolled through here and I didn't lose DirecTV ONCE. The second the wind started blowing, internet was gone for a week. I barely watch TV and the only thing that got me through that madness was the fact that I could still play Deus Ex: Human Revolution (it had just come out).

I really, really, really hope there is a way around it. I strongly prefer the Xbox product over the Playstation product and I have ever intention of owning both again, but I also have a $2300 PC with dual 24 inch monitors and a third port I can throw to my TV that I will switch to in a heart beat.